Phase Separation Behavior in Tough and Self-Healing Polyampholyte Hydrogels

Polyampholyte hydrogels (PA gels) are drawing great attention for their excellent mechanical properties including self-healing, high toughness, and fatigue resistance. These mechanical performances are found to be attributed to the hierarchical structure of the PA gels, consisting of reversible ionic bonds at the 1 nm scale, permanent polymer network at the 10 nm scale, and bicontinuous phase network at the 100 nm scale. In this work, we...